You have properly defined your assets, now it’s time for django-assets to work it’s magic. You’re deploying, and want your media files merged and compressed.
There are two different ways to do so.
By default, whenever a change in one of the source files is detected, the bundle it belongs to will be regenerated. Changes are detected by looking at the lastmod timestamp of both the source files and the target files.
You can change this behavior by using the ASSETS_UPDATER setting. Currently, only the timestamp-based updater is available.
Setting the option to False will disable the automatic building of assets. In addition, you might want to disable ASSETS_AUTO_CREATE; otherwise, your bundles will still be automatically built the first time, when they didn’t exist before, regardless of the active updater.
Alternatively, there is a management command that will allow you to force a rebuild of your assets whenever you like to:
$ ./manage.py assets rebuild
Building asset: cache/site.js
Building asset: cache/ie7.js
Building asset: cache/site.css
This works well if you have defined your bundles in code and registered with the system. If your assets are defined directly inside your templates, things are not quite as simple, since django-assets cannot easily tell which those are.
To build assets defined in templates, you need to pass the --parse-temlates option:
if they are inside teplates, do:
$ ./manage.py assets rebuild --parse-templates
Searching templates...
Parsed 156 templates, found 3 valid assets.
Building asset: cache/site.js
Building asset: cache/ie7.js
Building asset: cache/site.css
When using Jinja2, particular attention needs to be payed to ensuring that django-assets is able to load your templates.